


they could tell Boccaccio a tale

by kmo



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/M, Missing Scene, mischa feels, post-secondo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-01
Updated: 2015-08-01
Packaged: 2018-04-12 11:23:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4477433
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kmo/pseuds/kmo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hannibal has a nightmare. Bedelia tells him a story- his story, as she understands it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	they could tell Boccaccio a tale

**Author's Note:**

> There are some vague discussions of past sexual abuse. They were alluded to in the 303 post-mortem discussion with Mads.

Bedelia is woken from a dead sleep by a high-pitched scream that echoes throughout their flat. A second scream follows, and then a third, each more anguished than the last. It is the sound of an animal caught in a trap, of an angry ghost wailing down a lonely dungeon corridor. It is the sound of Hannibal having a nightmare.

Driven more by curiosity than compassion, Bedelia wraps herself in her silk bathrobe and pads down the hall toward Hannibal’s room, long kimono sleeves trailing behind her. His screams have turned to moans and sobs, guttural mutterings in a language she presumes is Lithuanian. She knocks politely on the door and calls out his name. When he does not answer, she enters anyway.

The streetlamps cast a grey glow over the bedroom and she can make out Hannibal’s form curled in the fetal position in a nest of tangled sheets. He is rocking back and forth, moaning to himself one word over and over again and tearing at his hair.

It is not word, but a name:  _Mischa_. A failed incantation, an unanswered prayer.

Hannibal had told her that he had been plagued by violent nightmares following his sister’s death, but had ceased experiencing them once he immigrated to America. Now, it would seem they had returned. Bedelia is hardly surprised—in fact she had been expecting this. Will Graham had melted the long winter of Hannibal’s heart, and now Hannibal was forced to deal with the strange, nightmarish landscape that had lain in frozen slumber for over two decades.

Bedelia creeps closer to perch on the edge of the bed. “Hannibal?” she calls out softly, but he does not answer her. She touches his shoulder gently and shakes it. His eyes snap open, and she reflexively pulls back her hand. He looks himself over, sees the tangled sheets, the sweat dripping from his bare chest, and then looks back at her.

“You were having a nightmare.”

“I’m sorry if I woke you.” Hannibal’s voice is hoarse from screaming, yet he still attempts to wrap himself in the remnants of his person-suit.

Bedelia checks his pulse, elevated but normal. She feels his forehead and finds it warm but not feverish. Hannibal accepts her care with a surprising amount of passive resignation. It is hard to tell in the weak light, but she would swear his expression is one of shame.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she tells him and he nods absently.

Bedelia fetches a glass of water from the kitchen and damp washcloth from the bathroom. She hands both over to Hannibal and he receives them without a word.

“Would you like a sedative?”

Hannibal shakes his head, seeming to have regressed back to the nonverbal, his somber eyes those of a lost child.

She looks on with fascination and pity as he drinks the water and presses the cold compress to his head and neck.

“Do you want to tell me about it?”

Another childlike shake of the head.

Bedelia touches his shoulder again. “Well, perhaps another time.” There’s not a chance in hell she’s letting a psychological gold mine like this go unexcavated.

Bedelia withdraws her hand and places the now empty water glass on the nightstand. “Goodnight, Hannibal,” she says as she turns to leave. Bedelia barely makes it to the threshold before she feels Hannibal’s presence looming behind her.

Hannibal takes her hand shyly, but says nothing. Bedelia squeezes it back. Awash in a strange tenderness, Bedelia lets Hannibal follow her down the hallway to her bedroom. Lets him climb in bed beside her. Lets her arms curl around him and draw his head to her breast.

Hannibal falls into a deep and dreamless sleep in a matter of minutes. Bedelia keeps vigil, the analytical machinery of her mind whirring with insight and candle-bright with understanding.

*****

Bedelia awakes in the morning to find Hannibal gone. Gone from her bed, gone from their flat. There is a lovely sweet potato and goat cheese frittata kept warm for her in the oven, but not so much as a note telling Bedelia why or where he has gone at such an unspeakably early hour on a Saturday.

Late morning gives way to late afternoon, and golden Tuscan sun to deep blue twilight and still there is no sign of Hannibal. She would have been tempted to call him had he not denied her access to a cell phone.

The day ends and she retires to her cold and lonely bed, which had seemed neither cold nor lonely before she had impulsively let Hannibal in it for a night.

Sunday is more of the same. Leftover frittata as the churches of Firenze ring their morning bells in an echoing, dreamy fugue. An afternoon walk to her favorite piazza, treating herself to a completely indulgent scoop of  _nocciola_ gelato on her way home. Dinner alone, a saffron risotto, the type of simple, entirely vegetarian meal she could never get away with making when Hannibal was in residence. Altogether, her day bore a great resemblance to the many days she had passed alone in her home in Baltimore since her retirement. She should feel relief at her brief vacation from Hannibal’s oppressive presence and the danger that clung to him like eau de cologne. Instead she felt apprehensive, worried, the heightened anticipation of the calm before the storm.

*****

_She stalks the lonely corridors of her home, the half moon shading them in black and white, like a silent film. Something stirs in the garden; antlers slither up from behind the rose bushes, too sinister and too dark to belong to an ordinary animal. She smells prey._

_Bedelia glances down to find her nails have turned to talons, her golden tan given way to tawny fur that covers her from breast to foot. She is half-woman, half-beast. There is blood on her forepaw. It tastes fresh, and she is so very hungry._

_The stag-creature peers at her curiously through the window. Their eyes lock—they see each other._

_She imagines how good his flesh will taste when she tears open his throat…_

*****

Bedelia wakes in a sweat, the iron-rich smell of blood lingering in her nostrils. She’d had that dream again, the one that left her feeling both powerful and afraid. She breathes deeply, in and out, in and out, reassuring herself that it wasn’t real, fearful that it was not.

When she has calmed herself, her eyes snap open and focus on a dark silhouette backlit against her bedroom window. “Hannibal,” she says simply, unsurprised to find him there. She’s known for a long time that if she ever let him into her bed, she’d never been able to get him out again. Wasn’t that the way it was in stories? You had to invite the devil in.

He glances back at her, but makes no comment about her nightmare. “I couldn’t sleep. In my room.”

“You are afraid to sleep.”

“Yes.”

Bedelia sighs and pulls back the coverlet. She knows she shouldn’t be doing this, any of this, but the riptide current of her own curiosity is too strong and she is already so far out to sea. “Come here,” she says, beckoning him to her side.

He comes to her, docile as a child, resting his head against her breast, with an ease that should have been unusual but wasn’t. She wonders how many times he had fantasized about doing this with her, and calculates it to be at least equal to or greater than the number times she had fantasized about doing this with him. She holds him and waits for him to speak, idly stroking his hair.

When he says nothing, she prompts him; “When I was young and couldn’t sleep, my father would tell me a story.” A beat. “Perhaps you’d like to tell me one.”

“About what.”

“About Mischa.”

He pulls away a bit but still doesn’t leave the warmth of her body, his fingers interlace with hers. “You’ve already formed your opinion about her,” he says, alluding to her provocative words in the bath a week earlier.

“Yes, but my thoughts remain for the moment an opinion—you’ve never given me the facts.”

“Is this therapeutic inquiry or lucid greed?”

His words are meant to push her away and make her flinch—they would have once, but don’t anymore. “Do you want to risk never sleeping again?” she challenges, only to be met with stubborn silence. She changes tactics. “If you do not wish to tell me your story, Hannibal, perhaps I should tell it to you…as I have come to understand it. And you may help me fill in the parts I do not know.” She puts it to him like a game; Hannibal enjoys games.

Hannibal shifts in her arms to rest his head on the pillow next to hers in attempt to put them on more equitable ground. “Very well,” he says, sounding more disinterested in this exercise than Bedelia is certain he actually is.

Bedelia closes her eyes, composes her thoughts with care, a quill scratching upon the unblemished vellum of her mind. “Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a boy who loved his sister…No, let me start again.” In the grey light, Hannibal’s eyes widen fractionally in amusement. “Once upon a time, there was a mother who loved her children. And they were very poor, and sometimes they were very hungry, but she was their mother and she did her best.” This Bedelia knows to be fact as far as he has fit to tell her; the next is supposition. “She was very beautiful.”

Hannibal nods. “Her hair was spun gold. Like Mischa’s.” His hand fingers a lock of her curling hair in the dark, the slow bubbling eroticism that has become so familiar to her. “Like yours.”

“I know.”

“I never told you.”

“Not in words.”

Hannibal chuckles to himself softly, and Bedelia knows she has scored a point. He releases her hair to trace the bones of her hand. “My mother had the fine long fingers of a pianist. But there was no place in the People’s Orchestra for a daughter of the decaying aristocracy or the wife of a dissenter sent to the gulag for re-education. Her hands were chapped and reddened, crippled with arthritis by the time I knew her.” The bitterness and sorrow in his voice rings true, perfectly pitched. “She did not play anymore.”

“But she taught you to love music.”

“Yes. And I taught Mischa.”

Bedelia boldly presses on with her story. “The mother died before the boy could become a man.”

“Cancer of the breast. If we had lived in the West, she might have been saved.” His tone is clipped, antiseptic, as merciless as a mastectomy.

Bedelia scans Hannibal’s face—they are approaching the gaps in the story, the parts she does not know. “There was talk of sending the children to an orphanage. But the boy refused to leave his sister.”

Hannibal’s eyes turn glassy. “The orphanage was a terrible place—he would not have been able to protect her. They tried to run away—“

“—To Paris, where his rich uncle and aunt lived. But winter came hard that year, and their threadbare clothes and thin frames did little to keep out the chill.”

Hannibal adds, “There were bad men in the woods, fugitives and robbers. And they were hungry, too.”

Bedelia’s eyes narrow. “And they fed on your sister and then fed her to you?”

His face is flat and expressionless. “A good a tale as any.”

Bedelia tastes Hannibal’s words and finds a sweet lie amidst savory truth. “It’s a good tale, but not a true one. A sympathetic one, too. It might save you from lethal injection one day.”

Hannibal smiles in the dark revealing shining white teeth. He’s pleased with her. “And render myself into the tender care of Frederick Chilton?”

“It seems the type of story the readers of Tattlecrime.com would like to believe. Now shall we try again?”

“If you wish.” Hannibal trails his fingers up and down her spine like the neck of a cello—taking liberties with her body as she takes liberties with his mind. It’s mildly distracting, but not entirely unwelcome.

Bedelia unravels the threads of her tale like Penelope, follows the trail of breadcrumbs back through the woods until she finds the fork where she took a wrong turn. “There was no orphanage,” she states.

“No,” Hannibal says calmly. “I was fifteen and big for my age—I lied and told them I was eighteen. Old enough to work on the collective farm and do a man’s job. The villagers—out of respect for the last of the Lecters or sympathy for our plight—did not tattle on us to the Soviet authorities.”

Bedelia smiles a little, but says nothing.

“What?” Hannibal asks.

“I’m having trouble imagining you doing farm labor.”

“I drove the reaper. Fed the pigs. Mischa milked cows and worked in the dairy.” He cups her face with his hands, and Bedelia can feel small calluses there not made by a scalpel or a fountain pen. “I did not do it for long, though.”

The rest of the story is murky to her—it ends with Mischa dead and eaten, but Bedelia sees no clear path of how to get there. “And you were happy for a time…as happy as you could be without your mother. But then something shattered that happiness…perhaps not a gang of bad men but a singular bad  _man_.”

Hannibal’s eyes darken. “A stranger came to town. Like in an old western.”

“He hurt Mischa.”

“In the worst way.” Real tears slip down the sharp planes of Hannibal’s face. She understands what he means.

“And he killed her. Or, you did—when you tried to save her from him.”

He looks back at her, and he is tired and sad—not angry. “I don’t take responsibility for her death.”

She hadn’t taken responsibility for her patient’s death either—it didn’t change the fact she had killed him. “But you do take responsibility for eating her.”

Hannibal doesn’t speak, merely resumes playing with her hair, curling tendrils around his fingers like a child playing cat’s cradle.

Bedelia may lack Will Graham’s special talent, but she does have empathy. And perception. She sees the young boy out in the cold, hears the keening wails beside his dead sister’s body. She sees it all, the madness and the grief, Hannibal’s heart breaking and dying there in the snow with Mischa.

“The ground was too frozen to bury her,” she speaks in a half-trance, “and you could not bring yourself to leave her to be food for the animals. You consumed her rather than let the wolves have her. Skewered her heart and roasted it over an open flame out there in the forest.”

Hannibal’s eyes are bottomless and dark, without light, without hope. “There was snow, and woodsmoke, and blood. That is all I remember.”

Bedelia presses a hand to Hannibal’s bare chest, as if to read his heart like Braille. His sorrow is real, but something still rings falsely out of tune. “How old was Mischa when she died?”

“Thirteen.”

“You always made her sound so much younger. Thirteen is not a child.”

“She was my baby sister.”

“She was becoming a woman. Old enough to think for herself.” Her words are sharper than talons, and Bedelia again tastes blood. “Old enough to want someone in her life other than  _you_.”

“I know what I saw.” His voice rumbles, trembling her like the foreshocks of an earthquake.

 _And I know how possessive you are_. “The mind plays tricks. You know that as well as any.”

He grasps her skull in his hands and for a moment Bedelia is sure that she has finally lost her balance on the highwire she walks with him—that this is the moment that he kills her. Her heart ceases to beat, time slows down, and her last seconds dilate into hours. “Enough talk,” Hannibal whispers, stoppering up her words with a kiss.

It is a hot press of lips against lips, more forceful than tender. She does not kiss him back.

She’s not finished yet.

The sister, the winter, the man, the boy, the heart, the hunger—they swirl, and melt, and blend together, a recipe for the darkest of tragedies. It’s half-psychology and half-religion and  _she_   _knows_   _him_. She knows what no one else knows, not even Hannibal himself.

She curls close to him, lets her own fingers twist a lock of hair at the nape of his neck, lets her ankle hook around his calf. The time for clinical distance is long past. They lie intertwined like the lovers they have always been and have yet to become. “The world will never understand what you do, Hannibal. It is not destruction, it is communion.”

His eyes glitter a bit in the dull light. “Oh?”

She kisses him then softly on the lips, and he pulls her closer and closer to him, until they are sharing the breath of life. “It’s a ritual. You…partake of them…and for a moment it is Mischa’s body and Mischa’s blood that you consume. You slip the veil of time. And she is with you again,” Bedelia finishes breathlessly, drawing Hannibal to her for a deep kiss. She opens her mouth, welcoming his tongue inside for a taste. She feels him push inside of her and it’s like the poison fruit of the tree of knowledge slipping down her throat.

He breaks the kiss, and they are both breathing hard. “Nothing happened to me. I happened, Bedelia. I told you this before.”

“If you really believed that was all there was to it, you’d have consulted a theologian instead of a psychiatrist.”

“Perhaps so,” he says, dipping his head again to nuzzle the sensitive skin at her neck and shoulders. “Though I must say, this is the best session we’ve ever had.”

Bedelia shakes her head and makes no effort to hide her derision. “You are literally in bed with your therapist.”

He plants a tender kiss to the corner of her jaw. “And you are in bed with your patient.”

“How did our conversation make you feel?”

“Strange,” he tells her honestly. Hannibal yawns and snuggles against her. “Tired.”

“Good.” The warmth of his body, the emotional exhaustion of their conversation makes her own eyelids start to feel heavy. Her breathing falls into rhythm alongside his own.

“Bedelia?”

“Yes?”

He tucks his head in the small space between her chin and her breastbone, over her heart. “Thank you.”

He will not give her the satisfaction of confirming her insight—and that is confirmation enough.

Dawn breaks over Florence as they drift off to sleep in each other’s arms. Peaceful and untroubled, nightmares banished at least for now.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is spoken by Anne Boleyn in Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall; "Those sinners at Wolf Hall...they could tell Boccaccio a tale." 
> 
> Hannibal is the unreliable narrator of his own life. He denies killing Mischa, but I don't know if we should believe him and Bedelia doesn't know either.


End file.
